Never Live It Down

teenage talk, ego, bed bugs & breakups

I’m pacing barefoot under a lone stretch of shade in a Best Western parking lot, guzzling black coffee and chainsmoking. My mother is getting a hip replacement at a hospital a few hours inland from our microscopic fishing village, so she, my boyfriend and I have squeezed ourselves into a hotel room on the ground floor. Willits, California, a once booming, now barren weed town will be our home for nearly a week.

Room 114 has two double beds, a mini fridge that doesn’t shut entirely, and, as we discovered on our first night, bed bugs.

In truth we encountered exactly one bed bug, which for some reason feels more ominous than an entire colony. An infestation comes with clear instructions: evacuate immediately, burn your belongings and leave a scathing Yelp review. A single sighting makes you question your own sanity. A single bed bug turns you into an amateur entomologist, and you spend the foreseeable future squinting at your phone, analyzing side-by-sides and arguing with your boyfriend over what a true “oval-shaped torso” looks like, wondering if the microscopic debris he just found in his hair is the egg of a blood-sucking parasite or just a chunk of shower towel.

We spent hours stripping the sheets and examining the mattress seams looking for more. We laid on our backs beneath the wooden desk and chairs, ignoring the hardened wads of chewed gum and abandoned spider webs, flashlights probing at the corners because someone on Reddit said that the tiny leeches prefer to gather in dark, close-knit quarters. We poured over the curtains and the bedside tables, and came back with only bibles and mysteriously sticky fingers.

Winded, paranoid and exhausted, we decided to call it. Mom had to be at the hospital at four in the morning. We piled our belongings into the bathtub, another tip from the Reddit thread we had all been taking turns scrolling, announcing our incomplete findings aloud to the room while we unconsciously itched the back of our arms and base of our ankles.

The alarms we set proved useless, as we had all spent the few forced hours of downtime staring at the dark ceiling and scratching our bodies raw. By five, Mom was in her hospital gown, signing forms and answering repetitive pre-surgery questions as a young nurse with distractingly large fake eyelashes drew blood and marked the operating leg with a red “X.”

I wanted to stay in the waiting room until the surgery was over, but she insisted I go back to the hotel. Reluctantly, I folded. Mostly because arguing with my mother is useless, but also I had come to the unfortunate realization that in my frantic, sleep-deprived state I had forgotten both underwear and deodorant. The idea of spending hours teetering on a metal chair, trying to fold my arms across my body to conceal my eye-watering stench while hoping no one could see my pubes through the semi-sheer fabric of my stained nightgown was bad enough to send me back to our biohazard of a hotel room.

It’s barely seven in the morning, but already approaching ninety outside. Sweating on the scorching blacktop and in desperate need of a distraction, I light my second smoke and call a close friend of mine.

She is in the midst of a messy breakup with a world-class moron. One of those pseudo-philosophical guys who lives on orange wine and thinks that nobody can smell the trust fund on him so long as he uses chorded headphones and never repairs his shattered iPhone. They were together for a few months, in which time he never asked her a single question.

I don’t feel bad for men often, but I do pity their inability to be witnesses.

In my twenty-six years I have known many who can’t seem to stomach the idea of being an audience member. Men who believe that were they to allow the women around them to speak, they would run the risk of being wrong, of feeling dwarfed, of being reminded that they might not know everything.

When men like this encounter something real, whether it be a potential partner or a painting, they need to claim it as their own creation, an extension of their own brilliant mind. If they can’t take credit for it, they have to denigrate it, poke holes in its surface, invent reasons as to why it isn’t actually all that special.

I dated a guy in college who claimed to be an artist, a critic, a lover of people and places and all forms of the written word. For the first few weeks, I was taken.

Eventually I realized that he was only capable of lecturing, not discussing.

If I had read something he hadn’t, knew something he didn’t, had traveled to a country he had never been to, he was wildly uninterested in my analysis. My job was to sit for hours while he drank whiskey and smoked sloppily rolled joints, talking at me about his theories on space, his takes on ancient religions, his advice for women and criticisms of the #MeToo movement. I was admittedly too much of a coward to break up with him outright, but once I stopped blowing him, he bolted soon enough.

My friend is in the rageful stage of the separation, my specialty.

We spend just shy of an hour holding court, ranting about his horrible handwriting and exhausting relationship with his mother. How if she had to sit through one more drunken monologue about the spiritual benefits of micro-dosing and cold-plunging she was going to blow her brains out all over his vintage loafers. How he did her a favor when he fucked his ex-girlfriend at the high school reuinion he refused to invite her to.

Eventually, a gurgling begins somewhere in my bowels. I hang up and haul ass to the cramped bathroom, moving quietly so as to not wake my slumbering boyfriend. After several minutes of strenuous clenching and a bit of prayer, I return to the parking lot to waste more time.

From my throne on the curb, squeezed between a rusting gate that encircles the eerily green swimming pool, and a clump of dead or dying oak trees, I have a pretty good view of my fellow hotel guests.

Room 109 is diligently washing her Minivan in front of her propped-open door. It’s not the sexy, Charlie’s Angels kind of car wash. There are no hard nipples peeking out beneath a soaked white t-shirt, no tan legs squeezed into daisy dukes with the pockets showing. Her greying hair is gathered in a scrunchie at the base of her neck, and she periodically blows loose strands from her face while passionately scrubbing her front bumper.

I watch her for longer than I should, but she’s too focused on removing the splattered insects from her windshield to notice my leering. Did she bring her bucket and big yellow sponge with her? Is the front desk doling out cleaning supplies beside the barren breakfast of stale cereal and expired milk cartons?

Her arms move with the fury of a woman who has bitten her tongue for a decade too long.

Mountains of foam and soap coat her hands and cascade down between the tires, and I want so badly to walk across the stretch of hot concrete and ask her what she’s thinking, who she’s yelling at in her head. Did your husband’s snoring wake you up? Has your youngest daughter recently returned from summer camp with an infected belly-button piercing and an unshakeable attitude? Did you make the mistake of watching the news before you went to bed last night?

The frenetic quality of her cleaning reminds me of a friend of my moms, who rises with the sun to chew gum and play tennis, then goes for a run and scrapes tofu from her air fryer, a routine I have long believed she created to get away from her chronically stoned husband and forty-something year old daughter who still lives at home, and, according to Facebook, seems to be falling deeper down the alt-right pipeline with every passing day.

Eventually, 109 drops her soaked sponge into the bucket and retreats into her room. She doesn’t even stand back to admire her hard-earned work, just rubs her wet hands down her jeans and hastily closes the door behind her.

I grimace through another swig of my burnt coffee, acutely aware that the three packets of Splenda I added and forgot to stir have sunk to the very bottom of the melting styrofoam cup.

Moms procedure should be nearly finished by now. I rewind over the worst-case-scenarios I’ve been collecting in my head since the surgery was scheduled. My concerns range from realistic to down-right delusional. What if she has a bad reaction to the anesthesia? What if the doctor gets in there and realizes the hip joint is far more damaged than the X-rays illustrated? What if the entire surgical team has been replaced with drunken frat boys and my mothers unconscious corpse is lying on a beer pong table with a sharpied outline of a dick drawn on her forehead?

The rabbit hole of worry I’ve built is cut short by a collection of piercing, high-pitched giggles floating over from the other side of the gated swamp.

A clump of young girls, all braces and pink backpacks, are huddled on and around a rusting metal bench. Their backs are all bent towards the ringleader. Maybe things have changed in the decade since I was a teenager, maybe there is no hierarchy in this pre-teen village, but the height of her ponytail and sureness of her shoulders leads me to believe that she calls the shots.

The distance between their world and mine makes it difficult to make out every word, but from what I can gather, a boy named Jake has sent Ponytail a scandalous Snapchat message, and the group is boots on the ground, all pitching potential responses.

I don’t pity the girls, but not for all the oil in Texas would I be fourteen again.

Generally, I welcome nostlagia. But bile rises in my throat thinking about returning to that age, being back at my desk while the boys swipe my calculator to type BOOBIES across the screen, a daily routine that never fails to delight them.

So many constant little harassments that go unacknowledged, are expected, feel as normal and as familiar as breathing.

At the risk of sounding bitter, I often feel that my only role for much of my adolescence was to be either the entertainment or the scapegoat. I had to hold my tongue while the boys laughed at my breasts and brown skin during lunch. Then came math class, where I was told that my exposed bra strap was too violent a distraction for their brilliant, blooming young minds to bear.

The only counsel I ever received came in the form of brutal, sticky statements like “don’t worry little one, it’s only because he has a crush on you.”

Then one day, after years of being told that humiliation is just love in disguise, we are blamed for staying with the men who hurt us. These men who were once boys. Brilliant, promising boys, spitting wads of wet paper down our shirts and sending us unsolicited Snapchat images.

What a grueling job, girlhood.

The girls are still drafting their retort, charm bracelets clanking against massive metal water bottles, when my phone vibrates on the cement next to me. The nurse with the eyelashes is letting me know that Mom has in fact survived the surgery. Her and her shiny new hip will be waiting for me in room 201.

I stub out what I always say will be my last ever cigarette, stand and stretch and scurry across the blacktop, careful to dodge the ditch still full of soapy water. My boyfriend is in the middle of buying several brands of anti-itch ointment when he shifts his scowl from his screen to the bottoms of my feet.

“You better hose those things off if you’re getting back in bed.”

“When I was a little girl, the heads of my paper dolls came off, and it was a long time before I discovered that my own head would not fall off if I bent my neck. I used to walk around holding it stiff because I thought a strong wind or a heavy push would snap it… I did not hold my neck stiff enough when I met him, and so I lost it just like the dolls.”

Toni Morrison, Sula

“There is a power to her filth.”

Samantha Hunt, The Dark Dark: Stories